Recently started a training in Shamanism. One of our goals is to let go of our over domestication and open to be feral and agile. I had no idea how making this commitment in my process was going to change how I see myself and really everything the world. There are so many ways I’ve been domesticated that I sometimes don’t even realize. I just learned to submit and it became second nature. Now I can see the ways I've compromised myself and the way others do this too and it's quite painful.

My trauma. No matter what community I belonged to in the past no matter how spiritual focused or otherwise the one thing that always followed me was my trauma. Every group I belonged to would always end up the same way.

The greatest gift we can give ourselves and others. Tonight I sit with my inner little girls and my teenage part is here. She is angry sad hurting and feeling alone. As I visualize her and embrace her feelings I am in awe I still have hurt feelings from my first time falling in love.

Sitting with my heart has been a practice I’ve been cultivating for a while now. This practice has made me more and more in touch with what I call tangles in my heart. Tangles are pain or what feels like knots in my heart. What I experience the knots as are painful experiences I didn’t get the support or care I needed to process the challenging feelings and emotions I was experiencing. My experience is these tangles stay in my heart space and cause misinterpreted perceptions in my relationship with myself and with others.

My personal work in the last 15 years included lots of work with my inner children. All the grown and not so grown parts deep inside me that felt loved or felt stuck in fear. A major hurdle I overcame was in my later 20’s, when I realized I had continuously had partners that were physically, mentally or both types of abusive. But not only was I a victim but I was also using abuse. In my teen years I got into fights, I bullied people I didn’t like and was cruel a lot. So coming to the conclusion that I was being abused was also for me coming to terms with the abuse and harm I had caused. That is always the hardest part for us humans I think. Seeing the harm we caused is not something we want to look at. But in all cases we have to look at ourselves if we want to grow.

I’m 37 and I’ve never known until the last 2-3 years but some part of me always felt like I was missing something. Turns out I was. It was a secure attachment. For the last 12 years I’ve been really busy working hard on to overcome many things. First it was an ulcer, dysfunctional relationships, addiction, codependency, depression and chronic pain. To say the least it’s been exhausting.

This Summer I was walking past a painting In Carmel, Ca, it seemed familiar to me and a memory come of a painting that my great grandmother painted. A painting that hung in our house growing up. That painting combined with walking through this beautiful artist area of Carmel created an Aha... moment. All the sudden it was as if I saw the path of my female ancestral line laid out in front of me. All the lives of my grandmothers and great grandmothers combined and I saw a common thread. Almost everyone of my grandmothers and the females in my family have suffered some sort of abuse or had to leave abusive relationships.

When on my path I had an experience that bridged the gap between eastern spirituality and western psychology.

A little over a year ago now I started therapy with a new therapist who works specifically with the different child parts inside, to get them secure. It has to do with creating a secure attachment, not just for adult me but for all my inner little children too. Here's a little about attachment from my internal experience, study and my overall understanding. There are 3 attachment styles. Depending on what you read, these 3 I experienced myself and I believe explains it all in the name.

I want to talk about feminine oppression. This morning it is on my mind and heart. It's not just female oppression but the rape and violence being done to mother earth. Today this is burning inside me like a wildfire. Anger rage and disgust at the oppression and blaton damage we cause to mother earth and women. After visiting New Mexico and then India this month it's no wonder I am burning up inside. From reading about a nuclear power plant that has been giving the indigenous people of new mexico cancer to seeing rivers, lakes and land covered in trash in india.

I'm here in New Mexico for a personal retreat and wow what a beautiful place. The first night I was here was a new moon and I could barely sleep which is a semi-normal thing for me as my guidance has messages to get through me for full and new moons. What came up was a huge, huge amount of anger, rage and sadness for the injustice done to me and in the world.

Here's what I got. As humans there are injustices we see, feel and experience in our lives. We can hardly live without coming up against things that feel as though they break our hearts and all we want to do is change that injustice right now. Hasn't it been like this long enough? Surely the world is ready for this change?

In a guided coaching session into my heart space I looked around and saw 3 distinct places. The first place was off to the left. I saw thick dark fog which I couldn’t see all the way through but I had the sense that the space was huge behind the fog. Expansive somehow but also dark and mysterious, yet not at all frightening at all. When I felt into this space, I felt it as a representation of the the great mystery of life.

As life gets busier it gets even more important to prioritize our self care. Self care includes nature, intimacy, connections, time for friends & family, healthcare routines, social time and whatever els nourishes you as an individual.

About a year ago I had an experience that shaped my integrity about the way I do business. I signed up for a coaching program that I believed would be the answers to my prayers in helping me to start and run my new business. What it turned out teaching me was very different then I thought. It started when a friend told me about a woman who had been coaching her. She sent me texts, emails and many reminders to invite me to work with this woman. Finally I took a look and decided I would go to her retreat.

Putting all our eggs in one basket. It's an analogy I'm sitting with tonight as I contimplate grief, loss and death. I'm the grand daughter of 3 grandfathers whom either by accident or intentionally killed themselves. One when he lost his job another when he lost his family and the other had pretty much lost everything.

There are many differences my husband and I face having different cultural backgrounds. Recently at a family function with my him in India I was asked in a large group of people that age old question,” What do you do?”

For some reason I all the sudden felt so uncomfortable and could barely speak. I'm a life coach I said, they didn't understand. Coaching what, she asked. Intuition is my specialty, I said. I coach people on listening to their intuition. The crowd was silent no one making eye contact and surely not looking at me. My god that's never been so difficult in my life.

"Is the resistance I feel in my partner a resistance in me?" This is the question I'm guided to today during my regular daily feelings practice. If you are new to my blogs, a feeling practice is where you sit with a place in you body and deeply connect to give space for any unresolved feelings to come up. Then you meet those feeling with compassion and understanding. So, today I feel an overwhelming sense of resistance in my body. Feeling it, I feel my resistance to my partner's resistance to me when I come in to be close with him.

Each day I sit with the sensations in my body, whether it is for 5 minutes or over an hour, and feel deeply into them. As I feel into them, I feel unresolved stored emotions. Sometimes it is from an experience I just had with my partner, sometimes it's very old sadness from my inner child that doesn't feel safe or feels scared, and sometimes it's just about an issue that still feels unresolved to me.

Today I woke up with pain all throughout my body. Not again! I think. I was certain that I was done with this lesson. Obviously, I'm not… As I sit with this pain and feel into it, I begin to tune into some negative thoughts, feelings and emotions. Then I again remember what chronic pain has taught me: to allow the negative thoughts, feelings and emotions to come up, to give them space to be heard and felt, and to allow them to move through me.